The passive construction in Brazilian Portuguese: function explains its distribution and frame semantics influences its acceptability

Abstract Verbs can be divided in three major groups when it comes to the passive construction in Brazilian Portuguese: while verbs such as ‘escrever’ (to write) are fully compatible with the construction; verbs like 'ganhar’ (to win) are conditionally compatible, depending on the argument it takes as its subject (eventive vs. non-eventive ones); and verbs like 'ter’ (to have) are not compatible with the construction (cf. Ciríaco, 2021). In this study we check these findings and argue that the use of passive construction is motivated by its function, namely to give prominence to a patient or an entity to which something happened, highlighting its affected status, in a context where the agent is less important, and that once the construction’s function is recognized, all its properties and distribution follow naturally, without need for lexical restrictions or stipulations of any kind. Corpus analysis confirms the predictions that come with the acknowledgment of the construction’s function and reveals that passive’s productivity is a matter of frame conceptualization. Acceptability judgments also confirm that stative frames are less accepted than processual and agentive conceptualizations.